What: Bring a Potluck disk (made with corn!) to share and your own plate, cup, and eating utensils!

Why: Celebrate the Corn and its message for humanity. Also….Wisdom of Corn books and card decks will be available for purchase for yourself and gift-giving.

This card deck contains 89 cards featuring 88 more rare and endangered corn varieties. Each card has a corn portrait and a wisdom quote (drawn from Dianna’s quiet time, often with the corn). You’ll find the same beautiful photography of Cynthia Morin as the book Whispering Ancestors: The Wisdom of Corn has. The Corn wants to help us through these changing times!

As a Temple Seed Keeper, along with Nance Klehm, and Greg Schoen, Dianna Henry will be presenting at the Grand Opening of the Sacred Seed Temple in Estancia, New Mexico, which is being held Saturday and Sunday, October 26 and 27, 2013.

Dianna “Snow Eagle Seeds Sing’ will also be offering a Salon (workshop) ‘Listening to the Seeds’ on Sunday, October 27th.

In April of 2011 my journey began. The bags are packed into the car in Northwest Arkansas…

“!!Dallas?? !! are you sure your flight is still going?” 13 tornadoes are on the ground in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX area. I would be changing planes in the Dallas airport on my first trip to visit with Grandmother Flordemayo in New Mexico. At 4:30 AM that day, the computer says the Airport is still there and my flight to Albuquerque is still as it should be. So I proceed.

I am to meet Grandmother Flordemayo, the Mayan Grandmother on the Council of 13 International Indigenous Grandmothers, for the first time today. We have been in phone contact for 5 months regarding the Seed Temple she is constructing. Greg Schoen, my corn brother, meets me at the airport in Albuquerque and we proceed to Estancia, NM where a 40 acre piece of desert land holds a strawbale hogan and a donated Morten building which will be part of the seed temple complex.

We arrive to meet Grandmother Flordemayo and another important helper Patricio Dominguez entering the construction zone of this huge effort to build a place to safeguard our next 7 generation’s food seeds. Being lost everyday are the seeds to what we all know as food. Raising our own families food was common place even to our parents and grandparents. Now most children know only of a plastic packaged and prepared form of food from a local store somewhere outside of home.

Flordemayo’s seed temple vision is addressing this by becoming a seed reservoir with sacred blessed packets of seeds going out to young parents and grandmothers who will teach the keeping of these seeds to children and grandchildren. Our seeds are our living legacy. They die in storage if kept too long without renewal. Also, easily lost in one generation are the skills of raising our own food if these skills are not passed down to the next young people, our children, with the seed being lovingly blessed, grown, saved, and eaten as foods.

I left with hogan getting the last of its porch roofing put into place and the cement porch pad at the entry being poured to expand it, trees being planted, and more hurdles with the local zoning codes being addressed for the underground vault. Plans, plans, plans, and the sharing of brainstorming sessions. The Seed Temple underground vault is dug out of the land, and walls are being prepared with their framing. A few seeds had been donated already for the first preparations of 30 sacred seed bundles. Six of us sat in prayer, loving laughter, and excitement making the first little bundles. These immediately went out to peoples in a Kansas conference Flordemayo was leaving for before I myself left for home in Arkansas. I was later informed she came back with no bundles left, as so many were so eager to have them.

We have truly begun. (read more at this link…includes photos at the Seed Temple)

[This article was posted February 28, 2013 on the First Peoples Worldwide website – see below for link to original article]The Indigenous Peoples International Conference on Corn created an atmosphere where all
From time immemorial, indigenous communities in the Western Hemisphere have depended on corn not only as a source of nutrition, but as the center of their cultural traditions and spirituality. This past September, the Yaqui Peoples of Sonora Mexico hosted the inaugural “Indigenous Peoples International Conference on Corn” in the Zapoteca Nation of Oaxaca Mexico. The conference, attended by 48 Indigenous Nations across from North, Central and South America, was created to encourage unity among indigenous communities, restore traditional economies, and ensure the survival of all native varieties of corn.

The Indigenous Corn Peoples are a part of long-standing cultural tradition tied to the natural world. The core principle of the Yaqui Peoples, “is the sacredness, mystery and life-sustaining power of the natural world and living things.” They are deeply connected to their environment and express this through traditional ceremonies, songs, and dances. They consider their relationship with plants and animals as inter-dependent and interwoven. It’s for this reason that corn, the fundamental means of nutrition and healing, is so respected and cherished. In indigenous communities, the people are directly related to all steps of the corn production process. Before the planting of the corn, there are ceremonies to express appreciation for the earth that allows the corn to be planted and for the water to allows it to grow. When it is time to harvest the corn there is a ceremony celebrating corn as the source of life and creation. The harvesting of corn isn’t simply to acquire food, but celebrates the all-encompassing lifestyle of devotion to the earth. One member of the Yaqui reiterates: “Our struggles to protect corn as a source of our lives cannot be separated from our struggles to defend our rights to land, water, traditional knowledge and self-determination.”

Environmental degradation is a global issue, but for the Yaqui community, it comes with devastating consequences. The booming agri-business has not only pushed many Indigenous communities off of their land, but also heavily promoted the use of chemical pesticides and genetically modified (GMO) corn. The Mexican government has been a source of conflict, creating programs that cut off access to land and clean water, and mandating the use of this GMO corn for small farmers. The introduction of these corn variations has dramatically decreased the diversity and resiliency of traditional seed varieties. The new strains of corn require much higher levels of agro-chemicals and water, which the Sonora desert ecosystem cannot provide. These negative effects aren’t only environmental. In 1997 Dr. Elizabeth Guillette conducted a study that detected high levels of pesticides in mothers’ milk and found severe learning and development disabilities in Yaqui children living in these high pesticide areas. The Yaqui people started the Corn Conference as a way to gain support of Indigenous Corn Peoples from the area and to stop the environmental, cultural, and health degradation.

Indigenous Corn Peoples could unite around a single mission to protect their sovereignty and identity. They called “for a new focus on sustainable and respectful use of corn as a basis for our traditional and collective economic, social and cultural development”. The Indigenous Corn Peoples committed to halt the use of pesticides and GMO corn in their territories. They also resolved for all communities to focus on restoring and strengthening local markets and economies by protecting their food and seed sovereignty. The conference attendees decided that the way to do this is by reestablishing Indigenous seed banks and trade relationships so that the seeds with the most resistance and adaptability to climate change can be used, replicated, and shared among communities. They believe that the renewal of an indigenous trading system in the Americas will be the most beneficial way to share knowledge across communities and ultimately, bring change.

Although the conference was only one step in the movement for Indigenous rights, the Yaqui ultimately achieved their greatest goal: to organize fellow Indigenous communities and Peoples to defend Mother Earth and her lands, water, forests and corn against the threat climate change and unsustainable industrial food practices. By embracing their heritage as Indigenous Peoples to protect mother earth, they are also protecting the culture, spirituality, health, and traditions that have been passed on to them for centuries from being lost forever.

Dianna Henry will be presenting a series of workshops on “Maize/Corn—The Food of Community and Ceremony for Eons-A Healing Way Tool On the White Road of Peace” at the upcoming Eureka Springs Earth Festival at the Retreat at Sky Ridge.

Admission to the week long festival is free and all are invited to hear Dianna’s talk on Tuesday April 23 from 10-11:30 am in the Pavilion at the Retreat at Sky Ridge. This talk is an introduction to Maize/Corn which has tied us all together throughout the world for thousands of years. Dianna will introduce the families of maize/corn and how they can help us with our community now and how we can use it for a healing tool, not unlike crystals and herbs. Dianna will also demonstrate this healing method. Whispering Ancestors: The Wisdom of the Corn books and calendars will be offered for purchase during the festival event.

A total of 4 Workshops will be offered on Wednesday and Thursday which will offer deeper study into these topics.

An article has been written about Grandmother Florademayo’s vision for the Seed Temple in New Mexico.

Grandmother Flordemayo is a woman of prayer, a healer, and a visionary residing in New Mexico. She is one of the Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers Council, and was born under the maya sign of The Seed. She shared with us her early visions of The Golden Child and of the Seed Temple: click here to read the article.

Learn more about Diana’s involvement with the Seed Temple on this blog page: http://www.wisdomofcorn.com/blog/news-events/new-mexico-seed-temple-and-visit-with-flordemayo

Beginning with December 2013 and continuing with the 4 phases of the moon over 13 months (through December 2014), this year’s specially designed calendar has been produced by Dianna Henry with photography by Cynthia Morin. Fourteen new photos of corn are included in the large format 12″ x 12″ coil-bound wall calendar printed on quality 130# card stock.

While supplies last, the calendar may be ordered online and will also be offered at the December Healing Path Expo in Eureka Springs Dec 11-13 and at the Metaphysical Society Meeting in Eureka where Dianna will be a guest speaker on Dec 17th.

The Corn Whisperer

by Kathryn Lucariello

“The corn has been the easiest vegetable to hear for most people,” Dianna Snow Eagle Seeds Sing Henry told a group of women gathered recently, “but every plant can communicate. The seed holds a huge library that we don’t realize.”

They were gathered at the Women Be Wise conference at Fire Om Earth in Eureka Springs, where Dianna taught a workshop on accessing what she calls the “Seeds Sing Library.”

She has worked with native, heirloom varieties of corn for 30 years, accessing the library for information about its history and the food, medicinal and ceremonial uses of the people who carried and cultivated it.

3 workshop participants form a triad for The Library seed readings while Dianna looks on

The library is esoteric, accessed through prayerful meditation, most powerfully in groups of three or four people. (more…)